Working art

Sandro Miller surrounds himself with the work of other artists. (Bill Hogan/ Chicago Tribune photo; styling by Cynthia McCullough)

When Sandro Miller opened his photography studio in a former CTA bus repair garage, some 23 years ago, he befriended the gang running the rough West Town neighborhood by inviting its members inside to shoot their portraits. In exchange, he said, they protected his building.

In the decades since, as the gangs have given way to hipster families and sleek condos have cropped up beside the classic bungalows lining Smith Park, the studio of the world-renowned portrait photographer has welcomed the likes of Michael Jordan, Gary Sinise and the Steppenwolf ensemble cast. John Malkovich, a friend and regular collaborator, has spent many hours posing for Miller's cameras.

The studio bustles with lights and props and backdrops and everyday people whose faces and body shapes have inspired Miller's vast portfolio.

Upstairs, meanwhile, a different magic simmers more quietly.

Atop the barrel-roof garage, Miller built himself a home brimming with art — none of it his own work — to serve as "a sanctuary using art to escape from the outside world." It smells of incense. A joyful twitter floats from the cage of three Gouldian finches, their colors so wild and vivid it looks as if someone took a paintbrush to them.

"I needed a release space, a place where I could be almost caressed by the energy coming off the walls," said Miller, who designed the home with John Kelly Architects. He moved in 10 years ago and now lives there with his fiancee, photographer Claude-Aline Nazaire.

The home served as crucial sanctuary for Miller last year. During several months of daily treatments for throat and neck cancer, Miller bucked recommendations that he just stay at the hospital and always returned home to the embrace of the art. He credits it with speeding his healing.

"Everyone says they pick up a spirituality here," Miller said.

The walls of the airy living room are blanketed in paintings, several by abstract expressionist Jack Mancino, whose "raw, dark" work Miller likens to Jean-Michel Basquiat. The center of the open living space showcases a bronze Virginio Ferrari sculpture inspired by Kafka's "Metamorphosis."

Much of the art was given to Miller as gifts from his artist friends or in trade for his own work. Some of the art isn't obviously art until Miller tells you so. He waved a tattooed arm at a bank of windows that drop down from the 16-foot ceiling, showcasing a slice of the sky outside.

Every detail in the home is intentional, from the long horizontal bookcase holding some 700 photography books — "Truly my education," explained Miller, who never went to art school and didn't complete community college — to the walls bathed in eggplant, plum and sandy beige hues.

"I wanted the walls to be alive and not just place holders for art," Miller said. "I wanted them to have a heartbeat."

Some of the art shocks. On a curved wall that divides the vast open living space with the more intimate rooms in the back, five long vertical panels of photographs show a woman in her underwear in a box, her face in a series of contortions.

Follow the curve around a bit and you find a sculpture of a baby with a rocking horse body atop a unicycle, like a creepy circus centaur. Above it hangs a photo of a prostrate man in a soldier's uniform with raw meat draped over his face, made to look as though his skin had been blasted off.

"I need to be moved by the artwork," Miller said.

Follow the curve around a bit more and you find that the wall isn't just curved, but in the shape of a sea shell, which eventually winds you into a bathroom, illuminated by a high round skylight.

In the guest bedroom hang lithographs of John Lennon drawings. In the hallway outside you find the iconic Dorothea Lange "Migrant Mother" photograph, which Miller finds particularly emotional.

"It just speaks to the struggle, the importance, the power of a woman," he said.

In another corner stands a sculpture of an African woman made of straw and plaster, holding a man's disembodied head in her hands.

African art, peppered through his home, resonates with him, Miller said, "probably because of its earthiness, it makes you feel like you belong."

One of the couple's favorite rooms is the light-filled den in the back, with floor-to-ceiling windows and lush green plants that spill out to the adjoining patio once the weather warms. A large chess board plays centerpiece and several buddhas dot the room. A Senegalese Thinker statue, hand-carved from a piece of wood, ruminates beside a white orchid.

In the bedroom, a giant, haunting painting by Wesley Kimler hangs above the bed, both bright and ghoulish.

"It's very manic, emotional, almost overwhelmingly powerful to have it in the bedroom," Miller said. "It's like beauty and the beast," he added, pointing to another wall showcasing a gauzy photo of Marilyn Monroe, from Bert Stern's final sitting with the star. /title??/

Tucked in the far corner of the bedroom, beside a nightstand holding John Irving's "A Prayer for Owen Meany," is a prayer area with collection of meaningful items — photographs, spiritual rocks, a card that they sent to Tibetan monks requesting a blessing and that they got back, duly blessed.

Outside the bedroom, a hallway is lined with Tony Fitzpatrick drawings on one side and Art Shay photographs on the other. There's Shay's iconic shot of French activist Simone du Beauvoir doing her hair naked in the bathroom and another, never published, of her pulling up her pantyhose.

"I'm a friend of Art," Miller said, explaining his exclusive. In many ways.